When Photography Meets Twitter, Art Is Born

Marni Shindelman and Nate Larson hope that their photography skills combined with Twitter can show the world a little glimpse into the beauty of the small moments in our lives. They’re traveling across the world, pairing geo-tagged tweets with a photograph of their location for a living art installation and an exploration of how our physical world affects our online personas.
The two professors are using Twitter to show how your physical surroundings may impact how you tweet.

As part of their Geolocation project, they’ve mapped tweets tagged with geolocation information. They then take a photograph of that location and pair it with the tweet, coming up with some pretty poignant insights into what part people’s location plays in what they tweet about.

They describe their project as both a historical monument to the small moments in our lives, and an intersection of physical and virtual living:

“We think of these photographs as historical monuments to the small lived moments, selecting texts that reveal something about the personal nature of the users’ lives or the national climate of the United States. It also grounds the virtual reality of social networking data streams in their original locations in the physical world while examining how the nature of one’s physical space may influence online presence.”

These are three of my personal favorite Twitter photographs from their original collection: